 Welcome everybody. My name is Tom Bruitt. I am the acting director of new works here at TheatreWorks, and I'm very excited to welcome you to the 2013 Meet the Festival Artist panel. Before I introduce the panel and ask some questions, I wanted to just tell and announce a few things. So there has been a little bit of confusion about the raffle for the container store. There is not a code word today. However, I wanted to give some hints about what the code words may be and what to do once you have gotten all five code words. So once you have all five code words, you're going to email them to the email address audienceattheatreworks.org. Again, that's audience at theatreworks.org. There is a little poster. If you go out this left door here, there's a little poster that describes all of this, and you can write the information down. What you're going to email is your name, your best contact phone number, and your email address, and then what are the five code words? So the five code words should be, in this order, grand opening sales benefit TheatreWorks. So we encourage you all to, after this, to submit those. We are unfortunately not eligible if you have been in a TheatreWorks play. If you are part of the festival anyway, you are not eligible to enter. But if you have come to the festival, you are eligible to enter. One last bit of business. So this panel is being live streamed on HowlRound TV, so people around the country and around the world can watch this today. It will also be archived if there's something really interesting that you heard and you want to listen to it again. You can go to HowlRound.org, and you'll look for HowlRound TV, and you can go into the archives and find this program. Also, so people who are not here today can tweet questions in, or if you are a little bit shy and you don't want to ask a question into the microphone, you can also tweet your questions from your seats today. Sophie Burke, our lovely intern. Please raise your hand, Sophie. We'll be following our Twitter feed. And all you have to do is put hashtag 2013 NWF. So again, that's hashtag 2013 NWF or hashtag new play. So hashtag 2013 NWF or hashtag new play. If you put that on your tweet, the questions will go directly to Sophie. She'll flag me down. And then I will ask the questions. So we're just going to do a little panel. I'll ask some questions. And then at the end, we'll have some people in the audience that will get your questions. So save them up till the end. All right. First, I wanted to just go down the panel and introduce everybody. So please just say your name and which piece that you wrote. James Sasser, a writer and lyricist for Kubal Moore. Please hold your applause to the end. My name is Charles Vincent Burwell. I'm the composer lyricist for Kubal Moore. Hey. Directions. Definitely the writer of a laugh. David Westry, the great pretender. Laura Marks, I wrote Gather at the River. Janine Neighbors, bookwriter for Mrs. Hughes. And I'm Sharon Kenney, the composer lyricist for Mrs. Hughes. All right. All right. So the first question I'm going to ask, the plays and the musicals have had different time periods out here. So the plays have rehearsed for three or four days, did a reading, had a day off, went back into rehearsal for two or three days and did another reading. And the musicals were here for five days. They did a reading. They had a day off to do some work, went back into rehearsal for two days, a reading and back into rehearsal for two days and a reading. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how that process was helpful to you and your particular piece. And we can just go out of order. Anybody that wants to jump in. Or I'll call name. Laura, what about you? Why don't you start? Sure. I'll go. Well, typically a lot of the readings that I've done have been a thing where you just rehearse for a couple of hours that day and then you do the reading. And so there is a really time to experiment with different versions of a line, different versions of a scene. This felt like a really luxurious amount of time to sit with the play, try new things. If something doesn't work the first time, well, is it the writing or should we try, you know, an exhaustive list of choices to make this work? So it's really been just a great experience being here. And thank you all so much for having us. Anybody else? What about a musical team? Well, a lot of times with the reading of a musical, you're on what's called a 29 hour contract, which means you have 29 hours ostensibly to learn everything, stage it and perform it. And that's barely enough time to learn all the music. Probably look at it once or twice tops. So to have five days to learn the music and then also have time to work on the script. By the time we were getting to our second reading, we were having a luxury of doing very specific character work and looking at the choices internally, similar to the process that you guys had. And that's just invaluable to us because there's so many moving parts to a musical that you can change one line and it completely affects a song that follows it differently. And the song might not have been working, but the moment before could have led into it differently. And we found that time to just be invaluable to have all of those different options. What about you guys then on the end, Mrs. Hughes? Yeah, Janita and I came into this process with the idea that we were essentially going to throw out our second act that we were coming in with. So she was actually in Chicago at Steppenwolf for that those first five days. So we presented our draft that we had been working on since June, and then we both kind of looked at it with fresh eyes and then took the second week to really tear it apart and experiment with the things that we had had in mind. And I think having a reading on Thursday was really helpful to kind of see, you know, are our ideas working? Are we going in the right direction? And then having a second reading today, I think we feel pretty great about the progress that we've made. And it's been fast and furious, but this isolated time has just been completely invaluable to, you know, being in the room together. And there's so many things that we can talk about with each other, but to actually see them and hear them and feel the emotional progression as it's happening in the room is just really rare and special. So it's been really wonderful. I would love, I'm so curious to talk a little bit about where the ideas for some of these pieces came from. Dave, could you share where you're? I'm Canadian and I grew up with a show called Mr. Dress Up, which is kind of like the Canadian Mr. Rogers, except that his shtick was that he dressed in costumes every day. And he had a tickle trunk from which she would pull out these costumes. And like the character in the play, the young lady, I used to turn my family's furniture into whatever Mr. Dress Up was making and do the crafts. And I feel like this was the start of my theater making. I wouldn't be here if not for Mr. Dress Up. So I was interested in that world and also interested in, I had done a play before about grief, a kind of sadder, well maybe not another play about grief, but in the more immediate aftermath. And I wanted to do a play about kind of the next stage of grieving as someone is trying to move on and find a replacement or not for that hole that's been left in his life. That's great. What about you, Laura? Oh, well, I'm from Kentucky and I was in graduate school recently with actually the people who are on either side of me right now. Dave and Jeanine were my classmates at Juilliard. One of our teachers there, Marcia Norman, is also from Kentucky and I've always wanted to write something that was set in Kentucky, at least partially. And I knew I wanted to do it while I had Marcia there to keep me on track. So yeah, I guess that was the start of it. Also, I got an email very similar to the email that starts the play. So quite honestly, when I started writing it, I didn't even know I would end up in Kentucky. But when I got there, I thought, oh, how nice. I'm home. And Beth, could you share where the idea for Laugh came from? Well, I think it was in a reaction to a play I wrote called The Jacksonian, which is very dark and has a murder. It takes place in a motel in Jackson, Mississippi in 1964, which is a very kind of violent time. And it was really hard to write that play. And when I finished it, I just thought maybe I won't write any play again, because I started looking at what there was to write about in the world around me. And it was all making me a little too upset. So I started watching these old films and started thinking about how subversive it would be to write a play that made people laugh and make myself laugh. And the lead characters in the play, Mabel and Roscoe, are kind of a nod to Mabel Norman and Fatty Roscoe, R. Buckle, who used to do films together. So I just had months in front of YouTube to inspire me. And a lot of the actors said that they could not have done that reading without YouTube, because both Sarah and Jeremy were, I guess, glued to YouTube for the week that they were working on that piece. What about you guys? Could you share Kuba Moore? Where did that idea come from? I was fortunate enough in my former life as a performer to travel to Cuba. And it's one of those things where you go someplace with a preconceived idea of what the culture is, and you arrive there and you find that it's completely different. And when we came back, I got to know a gentleman named Joshua B. Alafia, who had been there a few years before I had created a film, Kuba Moore, based on his experience there. And the experiences were so similar, but yet they were so different from everything that we'd been told about Cuba. So it stuck with me, the music, the spirituality, and all of those situations that Cubans and Americans deal with when they're trying to get to know one another. So I brought the idea to James when we were in grad school at NYU's Musical Theater Writing program. And James was very excited about the prospect of an idea of doing something that had a social foundation. But that was accessible to everybody because it was dealing with something that we all deal with, which is love. And that's how we decided, okay, well, let's do a love story about Cuba while incorporating the music, the spirituality, the different personalities, the language, and the passion that existed within Cuba. I had always wanted to go to Cuba as well. I've made a point of trying to work on projects to go to places that people tell me I'm not allowed to. Which is great when we try to come through customs. Exactly. So when we decided to work on the project, my father used to be a public affairs officer for the military, and we had friends in the State Department. And through them in the NYU Office of Globalization, I looked into getting a visa, and within three weeks we had a visa and a grant, and we went. Because I told Vince that if I was going to be writing about Havana, I needed to know what the air smelled like, what were the restaurants to avoid, cobblestones, all that kind of stuff. We found them. Yeah, we did. So that was our inspiration. That's great. And Sharon and Janine, could you talk a little bit about how Mrs. Hughes came about? Yeah, every year, Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts commissions one play and one musical. And they came to us, and for the commission, in order to get to the commission, you have to pitch them an idea. And we knew that we were supposed to pitch something, and Sharon called me one night with this really interesting story of Silvia Plath. And we both kind of obsessed with her, but we didn't know the story of the couple that sublet their flats, but kind of ended up changing her and Ted's lives forever. And so that was a pitch that we kind of took to Williamstown. And when we got that opportunity, we had, we pitched it in January of last year, and then between January and June we could outline, but we couldn't write a single word of it. Right, the whole stipulation of the fellowship at Williamstown is not one note, not one word on the page. So they essentially want you to show up and write the piece in four weeks, and then it results in a workshop production, which is a rough idea. And they cast it for you, so you have no idea who you're going to end up with Ted Hughes or Silvia Plath, and you basically go there and you just write the entire thing in three weeks, and then they stage it for two weeks, and it's this huge production. And it's just, so we knew what we were getting into with that, and that's kind of what, so we knew that like, if it failed, at least it would fail there. And if it has a life, at least then it will then it will have a life. So we kind of just decided to go with this very ambitious idea, because we had that opportunity, yeah, yeah. That's great. And each of, obviously in the musicals, music is inherently important. I wondered if each of our playwrights today could talk a little bit about how music is working in your process here at TheatreWorks, and then I wondered if Sharon and Vince, if you guys could talk about the musicians that you had, the percussion for Cuba Moore and the cello for Mrs. Hughes, if you could talk just a little bit about that. So Beth, you could probably start. I was really surprised. I knew that my play laugh would really benefit from music, and when David Schweitzer, the director, suggested that we get a composer in there, I was half thrilled and half terrified, because I thought it's such a short time. What is a composer going to do? But luckily we got Wayne, and he just happens to have an affinity for the time and place. He knows all the old movies, all the old music, and he couldn't have been more right for this and more giving, and just a joy, a joy to work with. So it was, and David had worked with him before, and he knew this, and I just think it made all the difference in the piece to have that music. Before the music for the Mr. Felt Show, I had written the lyrics, and then we were doing a workshop at Juilliard, and the director thought it would add something to actually have the music. So he gave it to his friend, Patrick Barnes, who works for The 52nd Street Project, which is in New York, kids write their own plays, and then they bring in professional New York actors to act them out, and it's a very exciting phenomenon. He doesn't know I'm using his music here. He probably does now. He may be watching the live stream, which you'll find out, and he'll get paid if I eventually do this, and I'll make sure that he's credited. But for now, we're just using his stuff, and the music directors here were fantastic, but kind of too good, because this show is supposed to be, the music is so simple, and Wayne was adding all these arrangements, and jazzing it up, and turning it into a Broadway number, and we're like, on the Mr. Felt Show, they were not that good. So it had to have that feel of spontaneous, you know, it's a guy sitting offstage just kind of trying to follow along with a totally unscripted children's show. So it was a very specific kind of music that we wanted, and it was great to have people here who could deliver that. And Laura, you don't have a music director. No, there's not a lot of music in my play. There's one song, and it comes at a kind of pivotal moment in the play. To me, it's sort of the hinge of the play, where you kind of flip over a little. So, and it's acapella, so there wasn't really much to do on that score. But I love that song. I'm always excited when we get around to it. Sharon, do you want to talk a little bit about the cellist, and why you decided to go with Joe? Yeah, I mean, well, first it really came out because it was being done at Williamstown, and they were like, you can have maybe two instruments. So there wasn't a lot to choose from, and obviously I'm a pianist, and I write on the piano, so that's my main vehicle for writing. And I just, I felt really strongly about adding the cello, because I think that it adds a richness and a darkness, tonally, to the piece that is really imperative. And in the writing of the score, it's actually kind of become the voice of Sylvia, to me, even in the first act when she is living. I don't want to spoil the, it's fine, she dies. And she, and then when she comes back, when she comes back, you know, in the second act, just not physically, but emotionally, and you know, what that voice and that presence is, I just, I think that I've always loved the cello so much, particularly with, you know, against a piano. I think it's just so, there's no, there are no words for it. You know, I just think it's so expressive and beautiful, and it can inform the emotion of the piece in a way that is really essential to it. And Vince? With Cuba, when I was there, I was, I was enthralled by the rhythmic pulse of the culture. There's rhythm everywhere. James and I would sit on the, on the roof of Hemingway's hotel, and you could hear music over here, you hear drumming over here, you hear congas over here, bongos over here, clave over here. And it was so synonymous with the culture of Cuba, it helps that I'm a percussionist. But during this process, it was really enjoyable to sit back and not play and listen to Billy work with the percussionist that we brought in, who Javier was amazing. And, and create that tapestry. It's almost like a part of the scenery, the music. And without that rhythmic pulse, it's not, it's not Cuba. So working with them and having the opportunity to put some time into seeing how the piano and Billy coming from a very musical theater background and watching him become a Cuban pianist. This is Billy Libertor. Yes. Wonderful. And wonderful experience and watching him become a Cuban pianist with the percussion. It was, it was a beautiful thing to sit back and watch. Aside story about our percussionist, if I can jump in. Sure. So we, we initially were bringing a percussionist who was a mentor, Vince is a Sekua Laue from Brooklyn with us and his wife is having a baby. So the last minute he wasn't able to come and he made a recommendation for Javier Navarrete, who ended up playing for us. And we had one rehearsal with Javier where he just played through the music once with Billy and with the singers. And we then, he came back the next day where we did our tech rehearsal. And at the break for intermission, we walked backstage and Vince sees Javier sitting with his head in his hands, kind of rubbing his face. And Vince went over to check with him to see what was going on. And Javier looks up at him and says, the guy who made this movie, I went with him to Cuba 20 years ago. And it turned out that Tata, the grandfather, is Javier Navarrete's godfather. So, and we had no idea when we got that recommendation. So for a story of about family for us to be on the other side of the country with a totally random, but there are no coincidences recommendation. It really kind of landed home the central idea of family for us with the story, both musical family and family, family. So, yeah. That's beautiful. I wondered if you could share just one really surprising thing that you discovered in each of your processes out here the past two weeks. I discovered an amazing young actress. And we have a gal in our company who is, how old is Maddie? 17. 17. I can barely tie my shoes when I was 17. I mean, she's just, she's so wonderful. And I think that you'll be hearing a lot more from her in the years to come. She's heading off to college in the fall. Madeleine Ruberall is her name. I mean, I guess I would say Steve Sanders, who is our music director, who's just amazing and wonderful. And I felt like he was in my brain and figuring things out before I could even ask him to do them. And it was just so wonderful to be supported in that way, both musically and emotionally, because it is kind of scary a little bit when you're, you know, presenting new things to the room that are not fully realized and to have, you know, a teammate there and a fully, a full team is really, is extremely helpful. And in Williamstown, didn't your music direct as well as? Yeah, because I was like writing them like five minutes before I would teach them. So there was like no music written down. So it was a lot. Yes. Were you going to say something else? I was really surprised by the support of the community. I was pretty amazed when they said they were going to do readings of plays. I was thinking, well, maybe 10 people will come. And why would they? And then I saw, oh no, they're actually charging money. But to be with this so much support for this theater and for new writers and new musicals is pretty overwhelming. And it was really quite a surprise. Yeah, I was also, I had heard about the audience feedback. I'd been prepared for that, but have not. I think it's kind of unique the way that theater works involves their audience so much and allows them the opportunity to give very detailed responses to the reading. And I read all of them because normally I'm standing at the back kind of eavesdropping as people come out. And then you may get things like unrelated to the play, you know, or you've kind of focused on these little tidbits you hear, which before people have time to kind of process and compose their full answers. So to get those beautifully written responses, it was very touching, the thoughtfulness that people put into the responses and very helpful because you so often want to just kind of go inside the brains and see what is working and what isn't. And so that's a great opportunity. I was surprised that you all really do in your heart like rap music. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anybody. But it was refreshing for you guys, for the audience to get it. And I was concerned about all types of things that I need not be concerned about. Are they going to understand the dialogue? Are they going to understand the medium? Are they going to hate the character because he's rapping? And it turned out that especially in those responses which meant, again, so much to us. About how we organized our work and what was landing. That the character that was rapping was one of the most loved characters and most understood. And that was a surprise for us. So then we had to go fix everything else. Yeah, I do want to echo that. I think the audience here has been like incredibly generous. And I think Sharon and I came into this process thinking that the entire audience would walk out at some point. I did not think that. Because this is very much a musical about Sylvia Plass. And I think it is a little polarizing and people don't know what to think. But I really just think everyone goes for the ride. And it's just been really, really surprising and great. And it's just been a wonderful experience. As a writer, you spend so much time in a vacuum within your own process. And to be able to have both the response of the immediate room of amazing people, directors, writers, actors, musicians that you're working with. But then also to have three opportunities to have this kind of exchange with the energy. Because what we do doesn't exist without this live audience, without you here. And that kind of feedback is so vital for us. I wondered if you could share just sort of one change that you made over the course of your time out here that has been pretty impactful. Has there been one thing that sort of comes to the... Act two. Act two twice, right? You have to think more about what was the most impactful. But just the most recent change, I can tell you. There's a scene in which Reverend Bill says, shoot. But for some reason in our reading the other day, it came out sounding like he said, shit. And I could hear the audience just recoil. They didn't want this nice Reverend to swear and I didn't either. So just to make it absolutely not confusing that he would not say, shit. We changed it to doggone it. I'm trying to think of something equally interesting that I changed. But I think for me it was mostly cuts and deepening characters. Because especially the Tom character who is the director of the show. I actually just reassigned some of Carol's lines to him. Because Carol was speaking so much. But it had to do with sometimes you don't kind of... You know where the characters are going to end up. But it's about building the arc. And not the Noah's arc, the character arc. And that was probably clear. And I felt like, you know, this is so technical and I'm now I'm just saying it anyway. But Tom has this whole interest in children's television. Which he eventually reveals has nothing to do with television. It's about the people that he gets to work with. And I laid much more of that in early in the play. And then also working with the actors over the week. They got much better at the puppets. Because there's parts in the play where they're supposed to do the same thing. They got much better at the puppets. Because there's parts in the play where they're supposed to be unskilled. And then there were parts where they had just got the puppets the day before. And so they were unskilled. So those are the things we really worked on. We cut a song to our second to last day of rehearsal. That had ended up being the last of the five original songs we had written for the piece. The only theme of music that is existent now in the show that was from any of our original ideas for the piece is the Mi Kuvati from the opening and closing. And when our amazing director, Kent Nicholson, who was so revolutionary with us, all puns intended, when he made the suggestion to look on Vince's face like somebody had shot him with an arrow. And it's my song. And I'll never forget that moment. But it completely changed the first act. And it worked so well. And just that feeling of sacrifice and letting go, we realized that we had our own Lazaro moment of that. And it was amazing. But to be able to let go of that in a safe environment and feel the support of everybody in the room kind of urging you that it's okay. It's going to be better was kind of an amazing feeling. Which is a great thing about this situation. We have the opportunity to completely and utterly fail and mess up. And then you have another opportunity to fix it. And that's unique. So, yeah. All right. I wanted to open it up to a couple of questions from the audience or Twitter. Do we have any tweeted questions? No? So Kimberly Moss and Jim Gross will be in the aisles. If anybody has a question, just raise your hand so I can see it. All right. One back there, Jim. All right. I guess Jim already. Okay. So I saw the Sylvia Plath play before you. Did much of the second... Or maybe you already did change the second act the first time it was performed. But I was very curious about if there were other changes and if it's okay to say what they are. I don't know if it's... So did you see at Thursday the first performance on Sunday? Last weekend. Sunday. Last weekend. Okay. We had talked a lot about the structure of Act 2 and in life after Sylvia Plath's suicide, Ozzya moved into her flat two days after she died and started caring for Ted and his children. And then eventually had her own child with Ted. And we started the act like that for a very, very long time. And something about her, we were always trying to figure out how to make her sympathetic because we always knew that the second act would essentially be her story. And rather than starting with them together right away, which is what happened, which was what the version was on Sunday, we decided to tear them apart. And that's kind of what the structure of Act 2 is. So it kind of has this like hourglass shape where it starts with them being apart, and then they come together, then they ultimately fall apart again. And I think that that helps with the sympathy of the characters because you have to find something to root for and in Act 2 you have to... Because Sylvia's gone, you can't root for her to be with anyone. You have to root for Ozzya and Ted. So... Right. We felt that it was coming off, if they started the act together, that it was kind of painting them as callous and not responsive to what had just happened and what they had caused. So we thought that it would color them much better to have them. To see, we are guilty about this and we do feel terrible and we're going through this too and we're not just carrying on with our lives as if nothing ever happened. That's great. Okay, Sophie, you said that we have a tweeted question. Okay, so the question is, what has been the most unexpected response to your play useful or not? Unexpected, so... I think, like Beth said, I just didn't expect that 400 people would show up to see it. I mean, go theater works. It's really... All right, Kim, do you have somebody back there? This is for the Mrs. Hughes playwright and Larissa's. Did you base any of your songs on any of Sylvia Plath's works? No. First of all, I think that to attempt to sound like... I mean, no one writes Sylvia Plath better than Sylvia Plath. So from... I mean, besides rights issues and everything like that, we really just wanted to make this an isolated kind of piece and do... It's more of the internal voice as opposed to the concentrated poetry of things that she labored for hours and hours and hours over. So it's more of the emotional expression. It kind of, you know, in her... Of course, I try to capture her language, but no, we haven't set any of the poems to song. I also think that her poems exist so beautifully as is, and they're not written to be sung. And I think that they exist in their best form as a poem. Whereas a song, you know, a poem you can look at and kind of digest and take time to really analyze. And as a song, you're hearing it for the first time and it's moving so quickly that I think that it's a different medium. That wouldn't translate as well as, you know, as beautifully as she has put them in a poem. Yeah, and Carol Hughes, the woman that Ted actually marries and at the end of the musical, is still living. And so she very much owns the rights to his estate. And Sylvia Plas, their one surviving child, has the rights to their estate. So I think it would be really tricky to kind of... To figure out how we would use that. Somebody from over here? This is my first time to attend the Theatre Works New Place Festival. And it was so illuminating in that I came to realize that stage readings are an art in and of themselves. So Ms. Henley, I was curious as to whether the front, frontal presentation of your piece towards the audience was something that was developed in the rehearsal room or whether that was in the script? Developed in rehearsal, it was they did the director's choice to try to get some sense of the flatness and the style. Because it's not a naturalistic play in any sense. And just to try to get the audience into that fact was his choice and I think it worked. It really did, it was as if the play became a film and it was a point of view shot from the audience, for the audience. So thank you. That's great, thank you. All right, right over here, Kim. Yes, this relates to the feedback forms. I found them for me very useful and enjoyable and made me think more about the plays and got a lot more out of it by answering the questions. What I wanted to comment on now, the third question, particularly since I just saw the play today, Mrs. Hughes, and fill out the questionnaire at lunch. The third question really got me thinking about what is the play about? What's the story about? And I wonder if you can answer that about divulging the answer to the quiz here. I should have, isn't it? I mean, I know what I answered on it, but I wanted... Well, Janine just whispered to me that she thinks I should answer this question, so I don't know. What is the... I mean, I think the play is about a lot of things and I think because we're taking a historical event that we think is theatrically and is theatrical and very... I mean, it's clearly emotionally ripe. I think that we're still figuring out the story that we want to be telling through this piece. We have a lot of things that we think it's about. I think it's about, you know... I mean, suicide, it's like Sylvia's... Here's a woman who is mentally ill and her suicide was in a way unavoidable. And then there's another woman who falls into the same fate, but she's essentially a victim of circumstance. And I think that those two questions, you know, how do these women who start off on opposite ends come to this very... The exact same ending through completely different paths. I think that is fascinating. And I think that the hope eventually is to... I mean, raise awareness is a little bit strong, but to kind of like... To raise some compassion in people. I think that the... I was saying earlier today that when you hear someone takes their own life, the easy response is, oh, they must be so crazy. And I actually think that's not true at all. I think that the harder truth of it is that this could be you or this could be me and it could be anybody. And we actually don't know what people are struggling with. And I think that this piece, eventually, the hope is that it will bring that to light and kind of raise compassion in people to understand that. Well, that's not quite the answer I had, but I'll turn it in anyway. Great. Anybody? All right, we have one right in the middle back there, Jim. Can you reach back there? Gathering has a lot of technology references. iPads and cable and the best line of the play, I blog. What's the challenge you have as playwrights to incorporate this volatile world of change and something that is so funny today, but will be stale tomorrow? And how does it reflect on your choices? That's a really good question and a good point. Yeah. I once took a class with this playwright, Will Eno, and I remember him saying, never put brand names in your play. You want your play last forever, God willing. But the fact is, we're just sort of writing and that's the world that we see, and so we're speaking to it, I think. So it's kind of, for me, I find it very hard not to pepper a play with contemporary references. If that means the play is obsolete in two years, that's going to be a bitter pill, but oh well. Anybody else want to talk about that question? Well, we have the interesting issue that change is happening so rapidly in Cuba and so much has already changed in the last two years since our first trip there. If the blockade comes down tomorrow, we have a wonderful little historical snapshot of what life was like in Cuba in 2012, 2013. And that's something that we've struggled with of do we constantly update and try to keep it now, today, present day? Because that was one of the things that we really wanted to explore was today's Cuba, not Carmen Miranda, Guys and Dolls Cuba. So that's kind of, as well for us, if it's obsolete in two years, we'll equate it to be in the same canon of shows like Cabaret that capture a snapshot of a historical era right before it radically changes. Does anybody else have anything? My play is a period piece. Seven, the year 2001. But in addition to avoiding the fact that each year could be, like it's already out of date, I don't need to worry. But I said that at the time when Dora the Explorer was just beginning and all the shows like Mr. Dressup and Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers were ending and the point where the man and his puppet friends met the cartoon and the dinosaur and all of that interests me. So that's why I said it when I did. And I avoided technology that way because it was less of an issue, I think. I think it's really hard to write. I mean, I respect, you know, and I think that that is, I think that that's a very valid point. But I do think it's hard to kind of not write for your time and your experience. Like if you are, especially when you're just trying to figure out what your voice is as a writer, you have to write about what you know and what draws you to write to begin with. And I think that there's a reason why you see a zillion plays of Shakespeare and they're always setting them in like periods like today and why like Romeo and Juliet is happening with like Orlando Bloom and a black Juliet right now on Broadway and they're just trying to make it, you know, modern and hip. And I don't know, I do think that plays date themselves eventually but there is nothing wrong with that. That's great, great question. All right, we have Juan right over here in the middle. Who's closest, Kim? Hi. As a composer myself, I'm interested to hear from the composers. How did you compose on the fly like this? Did you guys go with what mood you wanted to create first and go with the music or did you go with what message you wanted to write? What was the process involved in creating music so rapidly? Do you want to go first? Sibelius. It's a wonderful little program. It allows us to score very, very quickly. I think that because of the dramatic element of theater, you want to best personify or best forward what's going on on stage dramatically. And so from that perspective, at least for me, so from that perspective, my palette is pretty clear. And so it's an idea of, as a creative artist, you come to that divide of what's more important, that my voice is heard or that people understand what I'm saying. And so when I come to that, I tend to shade towards understanding because from my perspective, if people don't understand my music, then it doesn't matter what I'm saying. So, and that allows the more that I can create that put in filters and direct what my intention is, then I can say, okay, well, this person needs, this song needs four chords where for this idea or this idea is an extended sequence. So I need to move someplace. And again, seriously, with the advent of scoring software like Finale or Sibelius, I'm in the Sibelius camp. It allows me to create, I could actually create, I had to, when we got rid of one song, we replaced it with something else. And I actually created that in the room while we were rehearsing. And so by the end of rehearsal, I had a song for the performers to write. So if you know what's going on, creatively or dramatically, then it becomes a lot clearer. Yeah, I feel as far as like creating quickly, it's actually, I mean, it's scary, but it has its advantages as well because you don't have the time to edit and you kind of just have to go. Like we had a similar situation. What's today, Sunday? So yesterday, yesterday on our lunch break, we, I was watching this number and I was like, this is a disaster and this makes no sense. And we have to do this tomorrow at noon. So we better figure out, you know, on the lunch break, the same thing, I went home and kind of like threw something together. I mean, as far as, I think it's the same thing. It's like, if the idea is clear, the music can, it comes out of that. I also think that in our piece, there's a lot of information being given through the music. And I think that particularly shifts of things and echoes of things, I'm really trying to like to color the scenes because we have a lot of underscoring and incidental stuff going on. I think, what was the question? How do I write this fast? I'm so tired. You don't understand. How do I write fast, right? That's the question. Yeah, I just stay up really late and just keep writing until it's done. I don't know. All right. We have a question down here. You have the mic. Yes. This is for the creators of Cuba More. And the spirituality and the rhythm that you found in Cuba. Now, you know, there's a lot there. And I just wondered if you had a struggle with how much of that you were going to try to convey to an audience which is largely unfamiliar with that, even though it's huge, but it's mostly underground. The short answer is yes, huge. And in my experience, I was passingly familiar with Cuban music, but because of Vince's background as an African percussionist and whatnot, for me, it was also kind of to tag back to your question, finding what aspects of that music best inform the character in certain moments and best inform certain moments in the story. So there are moments for us that are completely diagetic, like the blessing, the esa, which because that is a very specific hymn to Oshun worked perfectly in that moment for Oshun to come down and impart that information. And then there are other elements rhythmically that we found that had certain messages that Vince was able to find, oh, this is perfect for that moment or that moment. Yeah, I, again, the short answer is yes. It is difficult because we don't know what the audience understands, especially being in it. Once you're in it, see we've done all the research. We, so there's things that we take for granted that we already know. One of the more difficult things was finding out how to put it in, put it in a way that, okay, the audience gets enough of what they do understand. And you can, and you have a, and we have a base and we can, and people can learn from there. And that's what we, that's honestly what we try to do. We try to say, okay, one of the characters dramatically is Zoe. Zoe is the person much like me when I first went to Cuba the first time because I'm American. And so if you can start incorporating the story from the perspective of how things unfold around this character, then the audience can hopefully go with us as you learn more about the spirituality, the Orisha culture, the, what's Cuban. Because at some point it was new to all of us. And we had to go back to that period of time. Okay, I salsa, I understand the beat, the step, okay, how did I learn it? And that's how we did it, both, and music helps. You sing a song, a ballad, you understand a ballad, you sing something that's in a spiritual context and you try to fill in the connective tissue. So that's what we try to do. And it was a challenge, yes it was. It also became a bigger metaphor for us about the Americans trying to understand the Cubans and the Cubans trying to understand the Americans. Absolutely. So it kind of looped back on itself the deeper we got into the process. That's great. All right, in the back. So we've discussed Williamstown's process and the process here at TheatreWorks. But as more and more theaters are workshopping new plays and doing festivals, what's most beneficial, or at least what are the qualities that are most beneficial to you as playwrights? Good question. Tiring them out, I think, is really... Well, I thought this was great. I really did. I liked, I've never worked where you got to see it and then you get a day off to work on it. And I learned so much in previews when my plays are in previews and you have an audience and then you rehearse the next afternoon. And I've never worked like this before, but I found it very helpful for this play. I would say the multiple reading process or presentation process is very helpful. And I know that there's a lot of, you know, the O'Neill does that. There's a lot of people who do that. I think it's helpful to write something, put it up, get feedback, and then go back. And you think that you're learning a lot in a room and actually, you know, talking to people and discovering things, but you've really learned by being in an audience while you're, while your play or musical is being presented. That's what really teaches you what works, what's confusing, and what needs to be explored more. And it's really, really fascinating. I'll also say the incredible support of the staff, like our stage manager, Karen Spahler and Tom Bruett and the, they get that writers have specific needs and sometimes that need is to be left alone. And sometimes that need is that your computer broke at 2 a.m. and you have to find a component to fix it. And anything, no matter how wild it was, was answered within a very short time period for us. And that, that amount of support in, in the rehearsal studio and also here in the theater was just incredible. Thank you so much for that. You're welcome. All right, we have time for one more question. I see one hand right down here. I'm curious as to how the particular actors that were chosen to voice and portray your characters helped shape how you saw your piece and maybe how it might progress in the future versus a different actor who might have done it in a, in a way that gave you a different reaction to it. I want to start off by saying a big thank you to Leslie Martinson, the casting director who puts together this. So I'll go into a little bit, the process here is a little bit different than for a typical show because typically you audition actors and then you have callbacks and that can take weeks, months, it can take a long time to cast a show. Here, Leslie puts together a pitch of two actors and some, maybe some YouTube clips of them and passes them along and says, these are some fantastic actors. What do you think? So it's really cast sort of unseen, which is very different than most processes. So who wants to talk about that? They contribute to the process so much that it's almost hard to sort of sum it up in a sound bite, you know. But I find it so helpful when I have really smart actors as all of these were and, you know, and they ask the right questions. Well, why am I saying this? Oh, hang on. Maybe that's me. You know, I mean, that's so helpful watching them figure out the emotional through line of the characters and one of my actors Dale souls who played Hazel has been with my piece ever since the very first reading when I had it at the Juilliard School. And so, I mean, I really feel that that character in particular has been developed around her. And yeah, she's absolutely indispensable to the piece as I'm sure you can imagine. Yeah, I had never done a workshop experience where I didn't know any of the actors. They were all suggested by Leslie and we just said, okay. And we're very happy with who we had because you, I had written a play with specific actors and minds in New York and worked only with those people before. And so, you just get new questions when you work with new people. And then you also get very different interpretations of the play. And if you, if everything goes well, you would hope that your play would be done in more than one place. And you won't always be there to say, no, you have to do it. It's kind of like trying to get the Jodi character to do it like Marilyn and Mr. Felt. You don't have that kind of control and so it's interesting just to see how your play translates with different actors and different audiences and how much of it is on the page and how much the actor brings. I felt incredibly lucky if you saw my piece. The actors were so game. They were just throwing themselves doing like flips and falling all over themselves. And I was amazed. I was, they couldn't have been more delightful and gifted and I got just so much from working with them. Who are musicals? Anything about, because especially having singers that you haven't have or haven't worked with before, is that... I mean, I think we were particularly blown away by the actors who played Sylvia, Sharon Rootkirk because she, we had never met her. She's wonderful. And we feel like, you know, she's, I mean, the play hinges on her and us feeling for her and we were, you know, a little bit nervous about coming in with an actress that we never met before and she was just so wonderful and game and you know, I mean everyone. It's like we're giving them, we gave them new pages today before reading at noon and they were just like, okay, like I don't know how they, you know, they're, they're, you know, again, like the support of TheatreWorks and the support of those actors is really special and it was wonderful. Yeah. Our actors became a family and I love that the, they came here and it's like we're all part of this process and we're in it together and as a performer, I can understand that but when things get difficult, then that camaraderie can become challenged and they were so smart and so game and we, we received some actors, some potential actors that we said no to. We were very specific about who we wanted and TheatreWorks worked with us and they were, TheatreWorks worked very hard to provide us what, what, with what we wanted and so when we got there we were, got in here, we were so impressed with what they brought to the table that we had to look at ourselves and say well, are we giving them enough of what they need because they were provide, well what do you think about this similarly and are, and, well would Oshun, well I don't know what Oshun, James, you know. I know, you take it. So, and, and they contribute to what we create and this is not the first time that we've actually, that we've had certainly had characters read and we've were able to find out how much we didn't know. Yeah. When we thought that we knew, no this character is this, we realized on another take, well maybe I'm wrong. Well maybe this is the way, this, this interpretation of the character is more accurate, it works better for the story. Absolutely invaluable to have live bodies, not just bouncing the questions, but bouncing the energy of our piece with the music and so much, and we changed keys for certain characters and that completely changed the color, the timbre of certain moments. That, that was such a huge aspect and you know, performers like, like Omari who, he created all of those different characterizations of a legua for us and we had never seen that. So that, that was such a huge gift for that kind of depth to come out of just two weeks of work. Well, great. Well, please join me in giving these artists an incredibly big round of applause. All right, thank you. Hope to see you at the 8 p.m. reading of Gather at the River. Have a good afternoon.